Josh Constine

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch.

Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, ads, ecommerce, games, and music technology.

Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master's degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.

Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes.

Josh Constine is an experienced public speaker, and has done on-stage inteviews with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AOL CEO Tim Cook, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung, and Senator Cory Booker. He's been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more, plus has been featured on television on NBC and Fox News. Constine is available for speaking gigs.

[Disclosures: Josh Constine advises a college friend's social location-sharing startup codenamed 'Signal' that is based in San Francisco. This advising role has been cleared with AOL and TechCrunch's editors. Constine's cousin Darren Lachtman is the founder of Niche, which connects social media stars to sponsorships from brands.]

Latest from Josh Constine

Referral traffic is spilling out of both Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly… Read More

Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down.
With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by… Read More

Last week, a Mountain Lion roared “Mac is the next big gaming platform.” Apple is bringing Game Center to Mac, it will support cross-platform iPhone vs. Mac play, and the Mac App Store will likely become more prominent. It’s time for mobile developers to decide if they’ll bring their games to Mac OS, and how they’ll port their controls and levels. Otherwise they… Read More

There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.
It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend… Read More

Zynga’s Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal who led the company to a 233% increase in ad revenue this year is leaving to become COO of Kiip, which lets brands reward gamers with real world prizes. Anekal is a monetization rockstar who pioneered social game brand integrations, helping companies like McDonald’s offer FarmVille players in-game powerups.
But now… Read More

Does Address-gate have you terrified that your mobile apps are secretly slurping up your address book? AdiOS is a free new Mac program that in seconds detects which of your iOS apps have the ability to access your phone numbers and email contacts. AdiOS doesn’t indicate if or how the apps are transmitting your address book, but you should still delete any that access it.
No. That was a joke. Read More

Independent game studio LittleTextPeople made waves at GDC with its eponymous interactive fiction game. Now it’s been acquired by virtual world pioneer Linden Lab, who will use its team and tech to create standalone products outside of its sole game Second Life. LittleTextPeople says it brings a “simulator able to model social practices and individual personalities”. That… Read More

There’s a referral traffic goldmine on Facebook, and today 13 more news outlets are staking their claim. The Daily Show, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post are launching Facebook Open Graph reader and video watching apps today or soon, Facebook just announced.
By automatically publishing stories back to the Facebook Ticker, Timeline, and News Feed, these apps will hope to score… Read More

more, More, MORE. STOP! Rather than cram more features into Bump 3.0, the team behind the 75 million-installs mobile app combed the data and brushed off all the features no one used. Now, instead of letting you wirelessly share apps, music, and calendar events with nearby devices, it only allows contacts and photo sharing. That’s a better user experience, and examples other developers… Read More

Facebook, a service built on real names and real identities, will tomorrow start allowing prominent public figures to verify their accounts and then opt to display a preferred nickname instead of their birth name. Those with verified accounts will gain more prominent placement in Facebook’s “People To Subscribe To” suggestions.
Verified accounts are not a departure from… Read More

What if political candidates could see the public’s reaction to their debate answers in real-time while they’re on stage? That’s the future laid out today at Stanford University during the Future Of Media Conference by Twitter’s Director of Content and Programming Chloe Sladden. If candidates saw tweets that they were dodging a question, they might suddenly become… Read More

Interest targeting? Sponsored Stories? Advertisers need a whole new skill set to succeed in social, and Facebook must dispense this education to keep revenue growing. To smooth the learning curve, Facebook currently offers two introduction programs for first-time advertisers.
FastTrack sets up brands and medium-sized business with an ads rep consultation and best practice-filled resources… Read More

Guess who knows what’s best for the future of Facebook? It’s certainly not public investors looking to cash in on “social” 8 years after Facebook started. That’s why those same investors should actually be happy about a warning from Institutional Shareholder Services noting that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg will own roughly 57% of the company after the IPO. Read More

CEO Tim Cook described Apple’s conquest of emerging markets today at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. He said “In 2007, and we didn’t launch the iPhone outside the U.S. until 2008, Apple’s revenue combined from greater China and several other parts of asia, India, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America was $1.4 billion. Revenue… Read More

Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our… Read More

Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit.
BitTorrent Live lets any content owner or publisher stream video to millions of people at good quality and with just a few seconds of latency…for free or cheap. Read More

Angry Birds has just launched on Facebook, and developer Rovio is trying out a different business model that flocks together with other freemium games on the social network. Rather than make you pay $1 up front for a mobile download, there’s 4 new powerups that you can buy for cheap – just $1 for 20 uses.
By expanding its in-app purchases beyond the level-beating Mighty Eagle… Read More

OMG. Pinterest now has over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users, according to Inside Network’s AppData tracking service. With gorgeous photography, and links to shopping sites, Pinterest is becoming an obsession for flocks of women. And they’re not afraid to show it, I mean, Like it. AppData… Read More

Only about 5% Facebook gamers pay to play freemium games. If Facebook could up this percentage, it and its third-party app developers could make a lot more money. That’s the idea behind a new promotion Facebook announced today where those who’ve never bought Facebook Credits virtual currency before will be offered $4 in free Credits when they buy $1. This gets users to set up… Read More

When you listen, read, or watch through a Facebook Open Graph app, a few of your friends hear about through the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. Starting this week, Facebook is allowing advertisers to pay for more exposure of listen, read, or watch stories that mention them by turning the stories into a new form of Sponsored Story social ads.
Open Graph action Sponsored Stories could… Read More